South Africa’s largest terminal operator has navigated a tumultuous two years of massive port congestion and inefficiencies that threatened to derail the country’s economic growth.
Transnet Port Terminals (TPT) is confident it has turned the corner, with improved operations and efficiency gains giving it a renewed sense of purpose.
The state-owned operator has reported a significant improvement in operations in its 2024/25 annual results, with container volumes surpassing budgeted targets and vessel waiting times reduced.
“Our revenue grew by 6%. Our automotive volumes were 3% up and 7.7% in the break bulk sector. The bulk sector has also seen improvements, with magnetite and chrome loading rates increasing by 29% and 26% respectively,” said TPT CEO Jabu Mdaki.
“We increased capital expenditure from R1.4bn to over R3.4bn. There were a number of areas where we showed improvements.”
Mdaki said improved efficiencies were observed across the sectors that they operate in, particularly the container sector, which is consistently averaging over 90,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEU) weekly since June.
TPT has faced massive operational challenges due to a combination of ageing infrastructure, equipment shortages and adverse weather conditions which led to congestion and vessel delays.
“We had a perfect storm where we had big demand and challenges with the equipment combined with bad weather ― we had about 12 days in October of severe weather conditions,” he said.
A shortage of machinery such as straddle carriers, rubber-tyred gantry cranes (RTGs) and ship-to-shore cranes (STS cranes) worsened operations.
Mdaki acknowledged that the intervention of the National Logistics Crisis Committee ― a presidency-led initiative to ramp up reforms ― helped identify slow procurement processes and regulatory compliances as major bottlenecks that needed to be rectified.
“Some of these were making it difficult for us to procure the spares that we required quickly to be able to repair the machines,” he said.
At the height of that congestion, there were more than 71,000 TEU containers stuck in vessels waiting to be unloaded. The Durban Container Terminal, which handles over 60% of container terminal traffic, had five vessels stuck at Pier 1 and up to 16 vessels at Pier 2.
Since then, TPT has worked on clearing the backlogs and improving vessel berthing times. It is investing R3.4bn on new equipment which has enabled it to launch 20 straddle carriers, nine RTGs for Durban’s Pier 1 and an STS crane at the port in Gqeberha.
Despite the progress, the company still grapples with adverse weather conditions and equipment shortages which resulted in reduced productivity at the ports of Durban and Cape Town.
Its operational performance review of 2024/25 showed that TPT fell just short of its annual budget target by 7% due to operational and market challenges, even though it handled over 4-million TEUs in that period.
It also missed its budget targets on imports, exports and transshipments by 3.5%, 4.4% and 26.8% respectively.
For the 2025/26 financial year, TPT will spend R4bn on cargo-handling equipment, which includes new RTG cranes, STS cranes, mobile harbour cranes, straddle carriers, reach stackers, empty container handlers, forklifts and haulers.
The operator has also signed a long-term partnership with German equipment manufacturer Liebherr for a 10-year supply of cranes and 20-years of equipment maintenance and repairs.
Mdaki said TPT’s recovery holds massive economic significance for the country as it handles cargo for major industries including automotive and mining.
“Manufacturers like Toyota, Ford and others rely on our ports to import and export components and finished vehicles. Our ports are crucial for the mining sector, enabling them to export commodities.”
The Port of Durban was ranked last in the World Bank Container Port Performance Index for 2024, with Coega coming in second last out of 403 ports worldwide. Cape Town was ranked 400, a slight improvement from the previous year. The port of Yangshan in China was ranked top.
The index measures the time ships spend in port and the number of containers moved.
“Ports that improved their scores often did so by reducing time at anchor, optimising berth operations, investing in digital tools and strengthening coordination across logistics partners. The evidence confirms that improvements are possible across ports of all sizes, and that rising scores are linked to deliberate actions to minimise time in port relative to containers moved,” the World Bank noted.
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